Darwin's Feast
by nikkilittle
Summary: A politician who preaches rugged self-reliance to poor people gets a taste of the dog-eat-dog society that he advocates.


"Darwin's Feast"

by Nikki Little

Our local congressional representative was at it again in the editorial pages of the local newspaper. I had picked the newspaper off a vacated table at a McDonald's under the watchful eye of a police officer. With a homeless encampment located only a five-minute walk away, the McDonald's management had hired an off-duty police officer to be at the restaurant all hours that it was open to the public. The face of the police officer changed every two to three hours, but his task remained the same: prevent begging. We homeless were allowed to use the restrooms – no small matter – but that was the only concession that the management made to us. Access to bathing facilities was listed as a requirement for employment.

The editorial lectured the unemployed to stop being a drain on productive members of society. He called us "takers," "moochers," "leeches," and a few other insulting terms. "Do not expect Mommy Government to pay your bills for you. You must take personal responsibility for your own situation. If you do not succeed in our society, you have no one to blame but yourself." Very profound for a guy born to a trust fund, I thought. I'd heard this social darwinist bullshit before. In fact, I think I had been hearing it since the 1980s. Reagan, damn his soul, had made it respectable again. This congress critter really rubbed me the wrong way. I wondered if he had the guts to bring his "message" to a homeless encampment. There wasn't a one of us in the homeless encampment that hadn't applied to this McDonald's for a job. Most of us had either college degrees or trade skills. We weren't supposed to be unemployed according to the current ideology of only "bad choices" being responsible for unemployment. Yet we were unemployed. Most of the employees in the McDonald's were fresh college graduates with heavy student loan debt. They were desperate to keep the bill collectors off their backs. They worked at McDonald's, lived with their parents, and put marriage on a shelf that I think they knew would be forever out of reach. How did this fucker get elected? I sure knew that it wasn't the college grads voting for people like him.

I wrote a reply on a piece of paper and walked it over to the post office. It was a hot, humid summer day, and the walk was tiring. The postal clerk behind the counter winced when I counted out a bunch of pennies for an envelope and stamp and came up seven cents short. The clerk took his own change purse out of his pocket and added seven cents to my pile and then swept it into his palm to dump it into the cash register. The tea partier behind me kicked up a fuss over the clerk giving me seven cents, but the clerk stated with annoyance, "Mind your own business," and pointed to the police officer on duty at the other end of the spacious lobby. This was the downtown post office, and it was quite large. It had century-old murals up on the walls depicting the labor history of the United States. The murals were famous which was probably the only thing which kept the local politicians from having them painted over. The clerk took my letter and wished me a nice day. His voice had an unexpected warmth to it as he recited what is usually a mechanically spoken phrase.

To my surprise, my letter had some effect. Our local congress critter would indeed address the homeless with his message of personal responsibility. At the McDonald's. That, it seemed, was as close as he wanted to get to an actual homeless encampment. Needless to say, there would be a few extra police officers on duty in the McDonald's.

He did show up at the McDonald's, but it was a nearly all-white crowd of enthusiastic tea partiers who had turned out to hear him speak as evening turned to twilight. I saw no other homeless in the crowd. I was the only one. There were four police officers in the McDonald's instead of the more usual one. This McDonald's, the downtown unit, was very large and had plenty of space for the crowd. All four of the police officers looked bored as "Mr. Personal Responsibility" threw a steady supply of red meat to the crowd of tea partiers. Maybe it was the warmth of his reception that lulled his sense of danger. I left the crowd inside and went out into the dimly lit parking lot to an outdoor dining table near some small, bushy trees. I knew that I was out of view of the security cameras.

I was still there when the tea partiers started to stream out the doors. Apparently the event was over. The three police officers who had been sent by the police department to provide security came out and drove away. I could see that our congress critter was still inside. He had made what turned out to be a fatal mistake. He hung around for a meal, apparently to prove his common man credentials, and engaged in some chit-chat with the off-duty police officer working security for McDonald's. I'll bet that the congress critter's desire to strip public employees of their union bargaining rights really went down well with the police officer. I'm sure it was on his mind. The congress critter's car was parked right next to the outdoor covered dining tables right where I was sitting, conveniently out of view of the security cameras. I sensed an opportunity.

The congress critter came out to his car, and, keeping the bushy trees between me and the security camera mounted on top of a lamp pole, I pressed a hunting knife to his side and marched him straight down to a cluster of evergreen trees next to our encampment near the riverbank. There were about fifteen of us total down there. We were invisible. There had been a homeless encampment in this location since the first Reagan term. None of us could remember the last time a newspaper reporter showed up. Or a police officer. The local government office employees in the big city and county government building across the street from the McDonald's had gotten used to seeing street people in the restaurant. They didn't notice us anymore. We were part of the local décor. There were two families with teen-aged children and a bunch of single males. There were two single, middle-aged women in our group, but you'd never know that they were women unless you looked very closely. They were both painfully thin with curveless bodies and weathered faces. They wore men's clothes and were just as grimy as the rest of us. One had a photograph of herself from twenty years ago. She had been plump, buxom, and baby-faced. She had looked like a plus-size model. Now she had the lean, muscled look of a construction worker. All of us had long hair. I knew all of my campmates well. I knew they'd go along with what I had in mind.

I tied up our congress critter with metal chains to a series of wooden planks nailed together inside the stand of evergreen trees near the riverbank. I didn't bother to gag him. The sound of the rapidly flowing river water would have drowned him out anyway. The evergreen grove had a way of absorbing sound, too. We normally used the wooden planks for cleaning the occasional fish we caught or gutting the occasional rabbit or squirrel we trapped. The wooden planks were about to get a new use. The two single women started a fire, and the congress critter, of course, was very interested in what we were intending.

"Well," I said, "you're always preaching self-reliance and making do with what you have, and that's what we're doing." I wondered if our congress critter knew how to do anything besides make money with the huge stack his father had spotted him as a trust fund. Probably not.

One of the two women who had started the fire came over with some instructions for me. "Make sure that you leave enough of the arm so that we can apply a tourniquet. We have to keep him alive so that the meat won't spoil." It was July. Stuff can go bad real quick in the summer outdoors.

I turned to the congress critter whose eyes were now wide open and staring. "I do apologize for the fact that we can't kill you first, but we don't have any refrigeration and we're hoping for four meals." His mouth was open, but no sound came forth as I brought the axe down on his upper right arm.

The End

This story is completely original and belongs to me alone. -Nikki Little


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